


Imaginary Presidents

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 14:05:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3491135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's his one fantasy. He needs it to live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imaginary Presidents

Jack believes in imaginary Presidents. It's not that he doesn't know what the real guy in the real Big Chair is actually like. He's met Henry Hayes. And even before that, he'd been what the clean little civilians called a 'tool of policy', and while he wasn't stupid enough to think they told Mr. Big Chair everything, you did not get to the Oval Office with clean hands, a clean soul, or by being really fucking stupid. When the presidents of the last four Administrations had given the orders that eventually boiled down to Jack somewhere on the ground with a gun or a rifle or a garrote or a SAM, they'd known what they were doing. War is a tool of diplomacy, sure, and Jack had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, where there was damned little diplomacy and a lot of politics. Sticks and bricks and fists and guns, and the ward-heelers had never known a thing about Saturday night when they stepped to church on Sunday with their clean hands and their clean wives and their clean children. Jack's father had been the one who stitched up the dirty secrets, and _kept_ the secrets, so that Jack could get off the South Side and claw his way free to the light and air. An officer and a gentleman.

He'd been in such a goddamned hurry to throw himself back down into the mud. He'd told himself that he did it because nobody ever really got out, and if he was the one doing it, somebody, somewhere could stay clean. And weeks and months and years passed, and he isn't sure when the day came when he realized that there were no innocent victims left anywhere.

He thinks that's when he started believing in imaginary presidents.

Not the guy he's really working for. Guys like Andrew Shepperd and Josiah Bartlett and Jefferson Smith (who, okay, was just a Senator, but _Jimmy Stewart_. The guy _should_ have been President.) Men who live in the fantasy world where you can wield power with clean hands. Where an individual can make a difference. Pay the piper, pay the Devil, and still call your soul your own.

Where it isn't so damned dark out here that you can't even see the stars on a clear night.

Imaginary presidents keep him going. They're what get him on his feet again when he doesn't have any more to give. They've helped him pull the trigger, helped him bury the bodies, helped him walk away from dying friends. That fantasy that somewhere out there, there's a good man, a man who knows what Jack is doing for him, who doesn't forgive any of it, who's working - hard - toward the day when Jack won't have to ever do it again.

It's his one fantasy. He needs it to live.

#

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't realize I hadn't posted this over here. It's in my fic archive on Dreamwidth, and it's a little hard to keep track of whether or not I've mirrored all of it over here...


End file.
